Wolf sees no "green shoots" of recovery:

From the FT:

What I find most disturbing of all is the reluctance to admit the nature of the challenge. In its policy advice, even the OECD seems to believe this is largely a financial crisis and one that may be overcome in quite short order. Even the latter looks ever more implausible: in its latest Global Financial Stability Report , the International Monetary Fund now estimates overall losses in the financial sector at $4,100bn (€3,200bn, £2,800bn). The next estimate will presumably be higher.

Above all, the financial crisis is itself a symptom of a balance-sheet disorder. That, in turn, is partly the consequence of structural current account imbalances. Thus, neither short-term macroeconomic stimulus nor restructuring of balance sheets of financial institutions will generate sustained and healthy global growth.

Consider the salient example of the US, on whose final demand so much has for so long depended. Total private sector debt rose from 112 per cent of GDP in 1976 to 295 per cent at the end of 2008. Financial sector debt alone jumped from 16 per cent to 121 per cent of GDP over this period. How much of a reduction in these measures of leverage occurred in the crisis year of 2008? None. On the contrary, leverage rose still further.

The danger is that a turnround, however shallow, will convince the world things are soon going to be the way they were before. They will not be. It will merely show that collapse does not last for ever once substantial stimulus is applied. The brutal truth is that the financial system is still far from healthy, the deleveraging of the private sectors of highly indebted countries has not begun, the needed rebalancing of global demand has barely even started and, for all these reasons, a return to sustained, private-sector-led growth probably remains a long way in the future.

The world economy cannot go back to where it was before the crisis, because that was demonstrably unsustainable. It is at the early stages of a long and painful deleveraging and restructuring. Fortunately, policymakers have eliminated the worst possible outcomes. But there is much more yet to be done before fragile shoots become healthy plants.